Improving UML Support for User Interface Design: A Metric Assessment of UMLi

Abstract: The Unified Modeling Language (UML) has been widely accepted by application developers, but not so much by user interface (UI) designers. For this reason, the Unified Modeling Language for Interactive Systems (UMLi) has been proposed to improve UML support for UI design. UMLi introduces a diagram notation for modeling UI presentation and extends activity diagram notation to describe collaboration between interaction objects and domain objects. This paper demonstrates using design metrics, in a quantitative way, that UMLi models are significantly structurally, behaviorally and visually less complex than standard UML models when describing the same set of properties of an interactive system.